a publication, an acceptance, a rejection, a reading, and a secret

I'm bursting with news I can't disclose yet because it hasn't been announced. So I'll wait for that.

This morning I woke up thinking about tonight's reading in the Mission and wondering how hard it's going to be to park. I'm looking forward to reading the title flash from THE LUNATICS' BALL. I got up and opened my email to a rejection of a piece that was accepted in the next email.

CLEAVER accepted my nonfiction micro "Faceplant"! It's about the pretty catastrophic fall I suffered a few years ago (when I had to give my talk for SUPERSTITION REVIEW with the camera off because I still had two black eyes). It's the only time I ever had involuntary flashbacks about an accident and I really wanted to describe that. 

I know Kathryn Kulpa, the flash editor at CLEAVER, so I wasn't sure it was okay to send it there. When I queried in advance, she said that she'd assign it to two other readers. She named the other readers in her acceptance. I really like CLEAVER and published two of my favorite nonfiction flash there a long time ago.

And my strange hybrid medley "Some Come Back" came out in BENDING GENRES today. I never showed this one to my writing group, since it seemed too odd, too much a product of my obsession with Poe (dating back at least to my PhD, when I wrote a 600-page dissertation on Poe and the American modernists, but probably back to childhood). I published an article on "Berenice," the least well-known of Poe's women, in Poe Studies.  I conclude my Bending Genres hybrid with her: "l admit it. I was obsessed with Berenice’s teeth. Obsessed. I abstracted them. Okay, I extracted them. I inadvertently buried her alive, but the toothless hag clawed her way out of her grave. Who knew she’d be back?"

(1919 illustration of "Berenice" by Harry Clarke)